Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8.(disk and file management software)(Product/service evaluation)

Byline: Terry Relph-Knight

Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8

Price [pounds sterling]50.47 (download price), [pounds sterling]57.25 (CD) Contact Paragon www.paragon-software.com

Paragon, founded in 1994, is an international software company that specialises in disk management and storage management utilities. Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8 Personal is its newly released home and small-business product.

As the name implies, this Paragon product is rather more than just a disk-imaging and backup utility. In addition it provides a toolkit for hard disk repair and maintenance. Tools include a Master Boot Record (MBR) updater, a sector editor, a disk defragmenter, filesystem conversion, a disk surface test and more.

Paragon uses the standard Installshield wizard for the installation and once installed, following a reboot, the product is ready to use. For online purchases you receive a key via email that allows download of the full program. Rather than include the ability to generate a recovery CD image from within the main application, Paragon provides its recovery CD as a separate downloadable Iso image which will need to be burnt to a blank CD using a third-party CD burner.

Some disk-imaging products here, such as Symantec Norton Save & Restore or R-Tools R-Drive Image, go to some lengths to make the backup and restore process as simple as possible by using wizards and limiting the information on screen at any time. Although Paragon also uses wizards to guide you through the backup or restore processes, it will suit those who like to see a little bit more information on the screen. The start screen is particularly informative about the status of the hard disks in a system. For example, it shows the type and version of filing system used on each disk, the disk serial number, the partition IDs and the partition type.